From hundreds of caching plugins, only a few do it well.
How fast does your website load?
You might think that your website is fast – but, this 2020 and almost every website competes for that extra microsecond advantage. More than 40% of internet users need the website they are visiting to load in two seconds or less.
As the WordPress matured, the introduction of hundreds of new themes and plugins, the total page size started to grow exponentially. It became extremely important to optimize the websites built with WordPress.
It is expected that most of the users abandon a website if your website doesn’t load under 3-4 seconds, and it is expected that 40% of people abandon a website if it isn’t quick. And a large portion of those abandoned users never return. If you are an e-commerce site, and for every user lost, you will incur lots of monetary damage.
Fortunately, there are a lot of free and premium Caching plugins that actually work. Advertising Agencies and Digital Marketing agencies can make use of the caching technologies to speed up client’s websites.
What is Caching?
Every time when a user visits a webpage, the server actually processes every request before the pages are served to the visitors. Depending upon the arrangement of your website, the loading time varies. Without caching enabled, your server charges will be increased due to extra work your server has to do.
Why do you need a WordPress caching plugin?
Without a caching plugin, every time a visitor requests for an element, the webserver has to process it even if it was already served to the visitor. The caching plugin will generate a static HTML version of the pages. The generated HTML pages are lighter when compared to the PHP pages.
There are probably hundreds of caching plugins, which claims to increase the loading speed. But, honestly speaking, it is extremely dependent upon the website content, and server environment. For example, Litespeed Cache increases the loading speed of the webpages in a Litespeed server environment, which results in faster loading time than other plugins like WPRocket, and Swift Performance Cache.
The Absolutely Best 5 WordPress Caching Plugins
- WPRocket
- Swift Performance
- Litespeed Cache
- Borlabs Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
WP Rocket
WPRocket is one of the most beginner friendly caching plugin out there. With their intuitive user-friendly dashboard that can enable both beginners and experience alike to customize the settings.
From our experience of using WPRocket for several client sites, WPRocket is the best when it comes to reducing the requests by combining files. WPRocket effectively combines CSS files, and JS files for a reduced number of requests.
Cache preloading, GZIP optimization, Browser caching, Database optimization, and Google Font optimizations enables the WPRocket to deliver an exceptional loading speed for the sites it is installed.
For the websites that have installed Cloudflare, WPRocket integrates well and synchronize the settings with Cloudflare to deliver smooth interoperability between the two technologies.
With a pricing of $49 for 1 users for 1 year, it is not cheap. But, for the value it provides, this is one of the best bet.
Swift Performance
Unlike WPRocket, Swift Performance has a free version that can be downloaded and installed from the WordPress repository.
Swift has a plugin organizer and an intelligent caching system, which can even cache AJAX requests and dynamics pages.
The setup is fairly simple since it has a wizard screen that automatically finds the best possible settings for your hosting environment.
Litespeed Cache
Litespeed cache is compatible with server technologies like Apache, Litespeed, and Ngnix. Although the Litespeed exclusive features require OpenLiteSpeed, commercial LiteSpeed products, LiteSpeed-powered hosting, or QUIC.cloud CDN.
Litespeed cache supports HTTP/2 Push for CSS/JS (on web servers that support it) and Load CSS/JS Asynchronously. All these settings combined has the power to accelerate your website to a very quick loading speed.
Borlabs Cache
A relatively unknown and fairly new entrant to the cache plugins list, Borlabs cache is based out of Germany and is powering a famous German audiophile blog which has over 15,000 articles in total. This cache plugin successfully preloads almost 6000 pages per day in this specific case scenario. Borlabs cache also has fragment caching, which will be hugely beneficial if your website has ads or other dynamic content, which shouldn’t be cached. It is fairly easy to set up individual cache lifetimes with this plugin. We use Borlabs cache in a few of our projects. This cache plugin also helps to improve your Pingdom tools, GTMetrics, and Pagespeed scores, which is helpful for SEO.
WP Fastest Cache
With over a million downloads from WordPress repository and over 50000 paid users, WP Fastest Cache proves to be one of the absolute best amongst the caching plugins. From our experience with WP Fastest Cache Premium plugin, we can confidently claim that this caching plugin gave us the least amount of Javascript errors. The developer of this plugin is fairly helpful and his support is excellent from our personal experience.
